Rainfall
by Eora
Summary: A rainy night, two rangers, one bed.


Disclaimer: None of these characters belong to me. All written in good fun with no offence intended!

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><p><strong><span>Rainfall<span>**

Softly, the rain fell.

"Did you open the window?"

Softly, the tone of complaint crept into a voice normally laced with boundless patience. There was the rustle of linen, a tousled head propped upon an elbow.

"Did I wake you?"

"The draught did."

There was no moonlight, nor were the stars free to glitter downwards. The grey cotton-clouds obscured all, lining the sky and letting fall cool mists that swept across the landscape like a ghostly veil. Faramir leant out of the window and let the rainfall dampen his hair.

The slither of sheets once more. "Don't think I want you back beside me in that soggy state." The crown of dark hair fell back upon the pillows, but stormy eyes regarded the casement and the figure framed within it.

The room was small, the inn itself barely even that; two tables below with a hatch in the wall served as a common room, the second-storey comprising only of the innkeeper's own lodgings and this, a chamber with a bed almost big enough for two, a chair and a window, man-high, north-facing. Faramir looked back into the room and the rain glistened upon his cheeks like tears.

Aragorn rolled onto his back, folding long arms beneath his head, stretching, the low-slung bedclothes revealing his flat belly and the ebon-hair trailing downwards upon it. Faramir watched him, and he watched Faramir. "Dry yourself and come back to bed; we must rise early tomorrow."

Faramir made a quiet noise of acknowledgement and reached out, pulling shut the window finally, cutting off the breeze. He shook his hair out, archer's fingers running through the waves, and climbed into the bed, sliding down onto his back, ribs against ribs, thigh against thigh with his King.

Earlier that evening, when the storm had truly raged, shelter had been found at the last blessed, soaking moment in the form of this ramshackle abode. The owner, retired mostly, lent his hospitality more willingly after Aragorn had shown him coin, though afterwards in the privacy of the bedroom Faramir had quizzed his King on why he had insisted they hide their true identities behind assumed names; it was not as if this man would likely recognise his King nor his Steward, bedraggled and be-hooded especially.

"Tonight we are but two rangers caught in the rain. No more." And that had been the end of that, with Aragorn disrobing; boots at the end of the bed, belt, cloak, jerkin, undershirt, breeches folded messily on the single chair. Faramir had followed suit, eventually, flinging his garments with abandon over the chair-back before clambering after his King into the not-quite-single but not-exactly-double bed. There were plenty of blankets, at least. And Aragorn was a furnace beneath them, burning darkly.

This inferno leant closer to Faramir, reaching with one hand to cup his jaw as a hard kiss found its way onto the near cheek. "Sleep well, Faramir. Again." The King withdrew, and settled, and Faramir closed his eyes, sleepy yet aware.

Later, surfacing from a dream that faded faster than he could recollect, Faramir heard the King's low whisper in his ear.

"Why do you like the rain so?"

Arms were around him, warm and heavy. He did not open his eyes.

"It cleanses. Everything is renewed. The very earth seems reborn." He breathed in the scent of their mingling body heat. "The sound of falling rain has soothed me to sleep many a night." He moved his arm, his hand sliding over Aragorn's hip to sit flush in the curve of his lower back. At what point they had melded, he was unaware. His eyes stayed resolutely shut; he lingered in a half-dream, almost-sleep, for if he were to enter wakefulness completely he might find himself behaving inappropriately with his King. But this was nice, and not for the first time.

"I like it not. It dampens, it seeps." Aragorn's unshaved chin prickled sharply against Faramir's throat. "The skies grow grey, the clouds gather, wind claws its way beneath your clothes and chills the bones. Roads flood, horses sicken, men slide into bed beside you with wet hair and cold hands." At the last, his fleeting grin could be felt in a scrape of whiskers upon tender skin. Faramir murmured amusement, the arm trapped between them worming its way beneath the King's narrow waist to meet the other in a loose embrace. Without any prompting, Aragorn moved closer, their chests and stomachs aligning.

"You are a pessimist, I see. You see only the discomfort of the moment, and not the opportunity of the moments yet to pass."

"I see no discomfort in this moment."

Faramir's eyes opened into blackness. They never spoke of it.

"To what do you allude?" But Aragorn did not answer for a long time, and Faramir guessed that he had fallen asleep, or was pretending to have done. Better that, he thought, than the study of this most illicitly innocent practise. How many nights, and in how many different beds, had they tested intimacy, becoming so increasingly at ease with one another that this alone seemed naught but a comfort on a chill night? Faramir dismissed the thoughts that crept into his mind; these were their hours, stolen or not. To define them would be to destroy them.

Aragorn shifted. "Never leave me, Faramir." A cool kiss printed itself upon Faramir's shoulder. This was new.

Answers, promises, platitudes even, filled Faramir's head, but in the end blunt honesty won control of his tongue and leapt from it before he could check himself. "Never leave _me_."

The arms held him more tightly, hot breath flaring up against his neck. Words in that low, lilting accent hung in the thick air.

"I love you."

And then, again, muffled and mumbled into Faramir's hair;

"I love you."

So quietly;

"I know it is wrong."

"To love?" Faramir lifted a hand and began to stroke Aragorn's hair. "Or to love me?" Aragorn stayed silent, and Faramir knew for a fact that he was not asleep, but he did not probe further. His fingers tangled in brown-black locks, silky and rain-scented. Aragorn was breathing deeply, his hands spread across Faramir's shoulders. Their combined warmth was incredible, and Faramir felt content to repeat those three words in his head and pick apart the meaning in them.

Aragorn lifted his head, moving back a little, though not by much. Uncharacteristic nervousness flooded his voice as he spoke, and Faramir thought he was shaking, but could not be sure.

"I would have your kiss."

That he need ask…but then Faramir realised just what this meant, and faltered, his reply, his action halted. A step further, but was it comfort? And then Faramir decided he wanted nothing more; Aragorn was the storm within his breast, sweeping him up in a flurry of emotion and strange new life. He leant closer to the King and did not speak. It took three heartbeats for Aragorn to close the gap, to let their mouths come together in silence and with a sweet longing. His kiss was articulate, tender, loving. Faramir shivered, and Aragorn held him close.

The rain continued, drilling against the window, falling more heavily until all night sounds were drowned out, and Faramir broke away from his King to look toward the shutters as the sudden flare of lightning illuminated the landscape beyond. Aragorn murmured, pushing Faramir's hair behind his ear, smiling. "Your storm applauds you."

"I think it merely approves."

Only when they were rangers did they dare come together, to sit closely, to lock themselves behind an anonymous door and feign exhaustion as excuse to put up with the inconvenience of a solitary bed. As King and Steward, they were only as close as those roles dictated, though each knew what the other was thinking about when their eyes met. It had been a slow, strange courtship, but it was not even that. They existed together, quite happily, with only misty thoughts as to the future of their unusual camaraderie.

"For once the rain and myself are in agreement." And then Aragorn's tongue was a deluge that poured into Faramir's mouth without query, and was accepted without hesitation. When the morning came, the rain might have eased off, bringing an end to storms of heart and mind. Faramir chose to forget about the cool creeping fingers of daylight as tangible ones, wrought of flesh and bone, inched their way across his goose-prickling skin; a hand fanned itself over his backside, caressing the firm muscle through the barrier of his smallclothes.

As Faramir's hand slid of its own volition downwards, he knew they were going too far. It was becoming something different. But by then someone else's fingertips were pushing gently beneath guarding cloth, into the copper thicket that flourished between his legs, and Faramir knew that if these digits went much further they would certainly discover exactly how this turn of events was making him feel. Worry ate at him, but he could not end the kiss, nor do anything but move his hips forward, pushing himself into an open palm and feeling a swordsman's firm grip encircle him.

"This is different," Aragorn somehow said, and Faramir knew what he meant.

"I can't…" Faramir managed, before ducking his head and feeling the heat of his own breath reflect back off of the underside of Aragorn's jaw. The King was stroking him very slowly, and it came to Faramir that this seemed more an agreement to satisfy a dear friend than anything inelegantly lusty. But lust was there, deep down, and Faramir was not unaware of how hard the other man was. It came to him too in that moment that he loved Aragorn wildly, but saying so was somehow somewhat trite.

The wind called their names and Faramir answered with a howl and a moan, subsiding into the long pulls of needed breath, his release hot and damp upon them both. He fell back, looking upward, weighing in his mind the difference between what he had just felt and the consequences of such a crossing of unnamed boundaries. When Aragorn sat up and looked down at him, that rare grin diving his features, the scales tipped in the direction that Faramir knew they would. Reaching up, his fingers and palm slid against a bearded cheek and rested there.

"You are the storm."

Aragorn's smile only grew wider. "And you calm me." He glanced downwards. "I am in need of your capabilities, my dear friend."

Blue eyes followed the grey gaze, and Faramir saw the King's excitement in no uncertain light. With anticipation liquefying his innards Faramir let fall his hand from the cheek of the man before him, scraping fingernails lightly down his throat, chest, belly. "You know, I have never done this to another man." The fingertips played amongst the hairs on Aragorn's lower stomach.

"How do you find it?"

Faramir shrugged, letting humour curve his lips. "Hairier, but little different."

"So different from yourself?" Aragorn's grin was wry now, and Faramir slapped him lightly on the hip.

"I meant compared with a woman. Though you _are_ hairier than I."

Aragorn grasped his own manhood through the cloth of his underclothes and gestured to it, the emphasis so bluntly masculine that Faramir shivered. "What women have you lain with that are blessed with one of these?" He laughed, and Faramir shook his head at him. "But we are not so different where it counts, are we? The knowledge of what to do is already in your possession."

Faramir swallowed, words unwilling to slip over his bitten lip. Suddenly it seemed all too real; that this was no comfort, no sweet embrace, no longer something to be passed off as an intensely close friendship. If he thought about it, deep inside he had known that all of this would eventually lead _somewhere_, and in his heart of hearts he known, at least later on, at some point on these rangers' outings they were probably going to fuck. But it didn't seem right, somehow, to suddenly dismiss the peace of it all, the measured pace, the inching closer both mentally and physically, to haphazardly embrace speed and lust and needless haste. The King had certainly seemed to switch from uncertainty and whispered devotion to brazen desire, but Faramir guessed it was because of Aragorn's worry, and the covering up of his fear of rejection that he acted thusly, and not from any false attempts at luring in his fellow ranger. He looked up to where Aragorn was still kneeling over him, hand between legs and spoke gently. "Lie down?"

The rain battered the window in a renewed welter of tempestuous fury. Aragorn matched it in the twisting of his hand in the sheets, the chaotic emotion in his eyes, but in all other movements he was tempered, pushing against Faramir slowly, the soft shudder, the quiet cry that left his lips as Faramir's hand continued to work between them. He was rigidly hard, and the caresses administered in order to relieve him of his condition were as skilled as any; Faramir indeed was no novice to this act at least, even if previously it was in a far more selfish scenario. The image of Faramir pleasuring himself would not leave Aragorn's mind and he found himself driven to the brink; suddenly he lost control, falling face first into the white shock of pleasure-blindness, and though he could not see Faramir's face he felt the younger man's pretty gasp as his King spent himself over nimble fingers without so much as a warning. He did not know whose hand it was that smeared the slickness of release upon his belly, but now even his own name was beyond recall, and he felt quite at ease to lie useless until such time as the tremors ceased coursing through his yielding body.

"I think it's stopped raining."

Faramir was sitting, head facing away, arms folded over bent knees. Time must have passed, perhaps he had slept. Aragorn ran a hand over his face, then remembered. He sat up.

"What will you do now?" Sleep must have come, Aragorn surmised, and with it, a Steward's unusual caretaking of his King. Looking down at himself, Aragorn realised Faramir must have discovered a cloth while he himself was absent from the waking world; clean and cool his skin appeared, no evidence of their dalliance remaining save in their hearts and minds.

"Mourn." Faramir looked at him, but his solemn tone was only in jest. Aragorn shifted closer, his chin resting on Faramir's shoulder.

"It will rain again, one day." He felt rather than saw Faramir's nod, and then the shoulder shifted, dislodging him as an arm lifted up and entrapped him within the angles of elbow and forearm. Faramir's gaze was close, the smile on his lips gentle, knowing. "What pleases you so?"

The younger man's grin grew wider, showing straight teeth. "Friendship." He moved even closer, his beard catching against Aragorn's as he spoke. "And love." His smile melted into a kiss, hard yet tender, close-mouthed yet pliant. Aragorn returned it with eyes open, tilting his head as Faramir began to lean back, pulling the King with him.

They lay together for a time, wrapped in each other, two rangers with hair messed by rain and sleep. The blankets lay tanged around Faramir's feet, an dafter a while he reached down, a lifted leg kicking the uppermost corner of the covers toward his hand so it could be pulled over them both. Aragorn was stroking Faramir's side, from ribs to hip and back, his heavy hand warm and firm in the motion. When he met Faramir's gaze there was silent wonder in his eyes. Faramir's arm slid over him again, resting in the crook of his waist.

"What of the future?" he whispered.

Aragorn pushed his fingers into the hair at the base of Faramir's neck, scratching him there with rough affection. "I did mean it when I said I loved you."

Faramir bowed his head. "I know."

"And yet, I have noted your response is still unvoiced." Faramir's head lifted quickly but a Kingly finger was placed over his lips before he could utter a word. "I won't be angry if you don't feel the same way."

"You will be disappointed, though."

Grey eyes gazed at him levelly. "Yes." And then, blinking; "It wasn't a planned seduction, Faramir. I didn't meant to ensnare you. Things…developed. And my heart opened unexpectedly."

"Indeed." Faramir's whisper skated across Aragorn's skin like a breath of wind upon the still surface of a lake. "I didn't set out to bed you, or kiss you, or even let you do these things to me. To touch me, to embrace me, or to allow me to return that embrace for longer than it should have lasted." His eyes were sad pools, deep and intent. "You are the storm that washes me clean and creates a new man. One who loves you in return, though was never brave enough to picture himself by your side."

Beneath the covers, they curled around one another. Their kiss was long, their limbs slow in their knotting together, as if fearful of sundering at any moment. Two rangers, caught in the rain. No more.


End file.
